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ATI and Linux compatibility

05-01-2010, 09:29 PM

Hi! I've been researching for hardware to buy a new computer. As I only use Linux but never used any ATI graphic card and a friend of mine said a while ago the combination is by any means no good, I wondered if the scenario changed over the years. Searching on internet, found AMD website FAQ, which states that "ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports Radeon 8500 and later AGP or PCI Express graphics products" (http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#2)

You, Linux users, owners of ATI cards, would you please tell if it's possible to do the combination Linux/ATI and still play performance demanding games (on wine and natively)?

I searched but couldn't find useful and **updated** material on internet. Most of material are from past 5 years!!

You should better get an nVidia GPU because of stability and performance. FGLRX (in my case) is highly unoptimised and unstable (for me its crashing X even for some 2D games). There is video tearing as well as you dont use OpenGL output and no HD acceleration at all.

Comment

- If you want to use wine a lot (I will never understand this type of linux user, please boot up windows and really enjoy your games) your card should be nvidia, because wine has better support for it. Although some games work perfect too with ati.

- If you are an opensource lover ATI should be your choice, at this moment it doesn't have power management (so the card runs hot), but this will be solved in the upcoming 2.6.35 kernel. 2d will be *superb*, and you have opengl 2.0 (opengl 2.1 planned for august-mesa 7.9) but 3d is unoptimized it runs at 1/2 1/3 of proprietary driver speed.

- If you want to use 3d linux applications-games, i will choose ati, ati evergreen is better hardware than nvidia fermi and has better performance/power consumption ratios.

Note: nvidia has video acceleration support and ati no, so playing hd video content consumes 30-80% cpu on ati (mplayer multi-thread), but the video is perfect playable.

PC2 decent computer with good cpu and gpu. Windows OS. This computer was sometype of console but with windows to select your game.

KVM switch to manage the 2 pcs with the same keyboard, mouse, display and speakers.

I understand that this solution doesn't fit to everybody but i was really pleased with that. Wine doesn't work with all games and you will waste a lot of your time (your life is time limited! this is important XD) looking winehq, trying dlls... Anyway good luck with your purchase.

I'd say that's a solid comparison post and sounds objective, imho. The only thing I'd add although I cannot profess to offer any kind of info about it, but the situation with XVideo. I guess you mentioned hardware acceleration so in that respect, it counts. Also, compiz and/or 3D Desktop Effects might be a factor if you like that sort of thing. I think it's interesting initially but isn't a deal breaker for me. Although, if you take a look at the overall picture, nvidia seems to have way less issues. Also, as much as the FOSS fans (I acknowledge the preference and ideals of FOSS, btw!) like the open source driver, having a split seems to mean a wait for both drivers to progress. Even if having the split has no effect or impact, the wait for features to be improved or established is a long wait.

If it's a Windows machine or you'll use Windows more than Linux, then it's a no brainer and no choice, ATI all the way. However, if Linux is the primary OS being used and Windows is only games or even used less often, I think it's way tougher to choose ATI. I guess it really does matter what you will be doing. If you really need performance for either gaming or 3D, then ATI might be a better choice. However, on purely Linux machines, it is a long wait for having full support. If you boot Windows on occasion, it's even more understandable to choose ATI. If you don't need high performance the GT200 Nvidia cards are easily more than enough.

I really don't see Fermi offering much more than these 'high power' cards and although there might be some mid-range cards eventually, I think I'll compare the GT 240 and ATI 4770. The HD 5770 I'd like to choose but it's a lot of money for a card that ATI/AMD is taking ages to support.

Yep, it depends what you want to do with the card and what's your patience level?

I'm not so technical about GPUs, but since you mentioned the Watts, don't you think ATI consumes more eletrical power than Nvidia and would be more expensive, when it comes to power consumption? Or am I wrong?

Thx for the replies =)

Comment

lool... you used to suffer, man. You can have Linux and Windows on different partitions. :P

One pc was totally fanless , 0db, 60 W, the another was 300W with 3 fans. I like to work, internet... on a quiet environment. And I like to be a little "eco-friendly" I only need the 300W computer to play games.
I'm not so technical about GPUs, but since you mentioned the Watts, don't you think ATI consumes more eletrical power than Nvidia and would be more expensive, when it comes to power consumption? Or am I wrong?

Totally worng Current ATIs consumes less power than nvidia at the same performance level.